Film
917: Argo
Trivia: Besides
being the title of the "movie" being filmed in the movie,
"Argo" is from Greek mythology. It was the ship Jason and the Argonauts
sailed in to retrieve the Golden Fleece.
In order
to make the movie feel like the 1970s, Ben Affleck shot it on regular film, cut the frames in
half, and blew those images up 200% to increase their graininess. He also
copied camera movements and bustling office scenes from All the President's Men for sequences depicting CIA
headquarters; for L.A. exteriors, he borrowed from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
As shown
in this movie, by the late 1970s, the Hollywood sign (which had first been
erected in 1923 as "HOLLYWOODLAND" to advertise an upcoming real
estate development) had fallen into severe disrepair. In 1978, the Hollywood
Chamber of Commerce had a fund-raising campaign in which they solicited nine
prominent people to give about $28,000 each (one donor for each letter) for the
restoration. Some of these benefactors included: Playboy Magazine founder Hugh M. Hefner, who gave the Y; singers Gene Autry and Andy Williams (the second L and the W, respectively), and
heavy metal/shock rock star Alice Cooper,
who replaced the third O (by far the most damaged of the letters) in memory of Groucho Marx. Warner Bros. Records, a division of the
company that later released Argo, donated the second O. However, unlike the
movie's depiction, this renovation was completed by the end of November 1978 --
a year before the hostages in Iran were even taken.
The
character of Jack Kirby (played by Michael Parks),
shown briefly as the artist of the storyboards for the fake movie, is the same Jack Kirby who was a pioneer of the American comic book
industry and a co-creator of such seminal comic book characters as Captain
America, Iron Man, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer, and the teams known as The
Avengers, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men. Kirby did indeed create storyboards
for the adaptation of Roger Zelazny's
novel Lord of Light, which were used as "proof" of the movie
production during the real-life "Canadian Caper."
While
Chambers, Mendez, and Siegel are trying to figure out how to make their fake
movie project look plausible, Siegel recalls that he made a movie once with Rock Hudson, and from that draws the conclusion that if
you want people to believe a lie, you should have the media disseminate it for
you. This seeming non sequitur is a reference to the fact that Hudson, one of
the biggest Hollywood stars and sex symbols of the 1950s, was secretly gay, and
his agent, Henry Wilson, actively fed misinformation about Hudson's
"girlfriends" (really studio-arranged dates for publicity only) to
the mainstream media. When the gossip tabloid "Confidential"
threatened to expose Hudson's homosexuality, Wilson instead fed them
then-scandalous information about two of the less-famous stars on his roster (Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter) and arranged a sham marriage between his
secretary and Hudson. Hudson's homosexuality was not widely known outside of
Hollywood until about half a decade after this movie takes place.
The
script used for the fake film project was based on the 1967 science fiction
novel "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.
In real life, makeup artist John Chambers
(played by John Goodman) came up with the title
"Argo" because he loved knock-knock jokes. In the film, the title
becomes an off-color joke.
John Goodman appeared in two consecutive Oscar Winner Best
Pictures: The Artist and Argo. In both films he performed a man involved in
Hollywood Industry; in The Artist he was a producer, and in Argo he was a make
up artist.
With John Goodman's performance as John Chambers, this is the only time that a real-life
Oscar winner is portrayed in a film that won the Academy Award for Best
Picture.
During
one of the many promotions for this film Alan Arkin didn't realize that Bryan Cranston was in Little Miss Sunshine, surprisingly quoting "Get out
of here. I had no idea!". This was due to the fact that both actors didn't
share scenes together (just like in Argo).
